In celebration of the relaunched, forward-thinking new JPMS, I’d like to skim through some dusty old music books. My current project, a critical guide to American popular music tomes, builds short entries around the authors, artists, and topics that accrued a corpus as far back as William Billings’s 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer. If my findings are any indication, a journal pursuing non-academic perspectives will discover not just different contributors but a different balance of expertise and guesswork, different interpretive moves and working archives, different glee at different moments in song.

Most enduring work in the literature of American popular music, meaning both the academic sense of a body of writing and the word’s use to praise striking language and storytelling, has come from outsiders: women and/or writers of color, authors displaced by sexuality, self-educated scholars, and elites deviating from orthodoxy. And that work has routinely taken non-university press shapes: compilations of songs, memoirs and biographies, fiction and magazine essays. Efforts to fix music’s meaning, by discipline or genre, have been less successful than glimpses of music, passed on like a riff or breakbeat, like the verse a songwriter distills to suggest a world.

It’s a familiar story that academic professions supplant genteel amateurs; for example, Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, about history departments, came out in 1988. That year JPMS debuted, part of an era when popular music studies were rooted outside music departments and a blip next to a best-seller like the Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods, when anthologized rock criticism by Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, and Lester Bangs filled library shelves, when even the first New Grove Dictionary of American Music used journalist contributors. Subsequently this paradigm flipped, with paid criticism waning and music departments allowing a popular music subfield: there was no need for Dave Marsh entries in the second Amerigrove. Charles Hamm, among the earlier musicologists of American song, recalled that doctoral readings resided in one library room; reading beyond those stacks felt like perusing pornography. By the twenty-first century, Irving Berlin or James Brown appeared in new Ph.D. book lists. Yet it’s still unclear whether non-academic writing, such as Jody Rosen’s on “White Christmas” or a 33 1/3 on Live at the Apollo, is now welcome.

Adding to the challenge, song lit includes more than popular music studies, rock critics, and trade books on the shark incident. To return to the 1980s, examples include Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where a former Rolling Stone writing prodigy turned undercover observer and then movie mythologizer of pop-rock teendom. August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom reckoned with black vernacular struggle. Nathaniel Mackey’s epistolary novel Bedouin Hornbook conjoined African diaspora and free jazz. William Gibson’s Neuromancer connected cyber and punk. V. Vale and Andrea Juno’s Re/Search volumes of oddball Q&As conjured Industrial Culture as Beat progeny and recast punk as a set of (another title) Pranks! In graphic novels, Los Bros Hernandez of Love and Rockets caught the magic in SoCal’s Latinx rock subculture, as Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor made jazz collecting a Cleveland file clerk’s On the Road.

Popular music has proven tough for classical types to notate: odd beats, accidental hooks, theatrical interpolations. An open-minded history of music writing faces a similar issue. Standard intellectual treatises, such as Jacques Attali’s Noise arriving translated in the 1980s, were a source of new ideas alongside equally noisy, more idiosyncratic, but less accredited contenders. What follows is a decidedly nonscientific survey of some of these twisted roots. I have two linked contentions. First, popular music involves not so much music and lyrics as music and the entire social and cultural field that supports and frames it. Writing that found a new way to chart an aspect of this universe, letting a part illuminate the whole, usually did more for our eventual understanding than refined orthodoxy. Second, this feature-not-bug allowed room for outsiders shut out of such orthodoxy. To ramble, haphazardly and gleefully, through books that predate us, is to realize that while such matters as commerce versus creativity, vernacular versus classical, Jim Crow versus “blackness” constitute core dialectics, popular and music remain the most fundamental intersection. Each word subsumes a panoply of selves and note-taking practices.

PROGENITORS AND INHERITORS

Let’s return to Billings, a 24-year-old tanner, unheralded and untutored, when he self-published The New England Psalm-Singer, inventing the American music composer and music book writer in the process. There was a frontispiece by Paul Revere no less and a lyric for “Chester” sung a few years later in the Revolution: “Let Tyrants shake their iron Rod, And Slav’ry clank her galling Chains; we fear them not, we trust in God, New England’s God for ever reigns.” Billings emphasized his inexperience with sarcasm: “I think it best for every Composer to be his own Carver.”1 He wrote psalm tunes because in Puritan New England singing schools, training congregants to respect notated text had become places of sexual merriment. Billings was revived as Americana in the 1930s New Deal, then as “a natural genius, a true primitive” who “gloried in his musical independence” in Gilbert Chase’s pivotal 1955 America’s Music.2 Richard Crawford, another founding American music Ph.D., co-authored a 1970s Billings biography and mapped his eclecticism in The American Musical Landscape (1993). Crawford reined in the never-quite-academic musicologist Chase; his Billings conceived and followed different rules instead of opposing all.

A different trajectory of books leading to books took Billings’s fuguing syncopations south and west, into the camp meetings of the early 1800s’ second Great Awakening, to emerge as The Sacred Harp in 1844. Fa-so-la singers performed the shape-notes in this frequently updated anthology of hymns and others like it. Singing conventions, an anti-modern modernity, kept strict rituals of traditionalism. By the early twentieth century, these events epitomized white southern populism. Vanderbilt professor of German and Nashville Banner classical critic George Pullen Jackson’s White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933), a major influence on Chase’s America’s Music, called the participants “country singers,” to contrast with tainted urban pop.3 Jackson also obsessively asserted that black spirituals derived from white sources; his academic apparatus reads now as pseudoscience. Ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller, by contrast, went to 90 conventions in 15 states between 1997 and 2006, finding a diasporic network. Too savvy to reduce this as Jackson had, she wrote, “The Sacred Harp is a teaching tool, propaganda vehicle, multivalent symbol, and transcendent canon in one.” Refusing objectivity, Miller reacted like a transplanted southerner at a New England convention. “Things proceeded more or less as I expected—until a leader on his way into the square took a starting pitch from a pitch pipe. With a visceral shock of indignation, I immediately shut my book and sat out his lesson.”4

Mapping the Billings bibliography still a third way would consider his writing outside tunebooks; magazine articles with true crime narratives, as documented in Michael Broyles’s Mavericks. These anticipated 1830s Jacksonian-era tabloids and blackface minstrelsy. Dale Cockrell, a student of Hamm’s, wrote in his 1997 minstrelsy study Demons of Disorder that he identified via region and class with rockabilly; were minstrels and Sun Records performers the “true primitive” Chase saw in Billings or a different beast? The minstrel texts were near-books: broadsheet printings of “Jim Crow” offered up to 150−160 verses, with lyrics that challenged as much as reinforced convention: “Should dey get to fighting, Perhaps de blacks will rise, For deir wish for freedom, Is shining in deir eyes.”5 That song’s author, Thomas Rice, preoccupied W.T. Lhamon, Jr., a 1970s New Republic rock critic turned American studies scholar, whose first book, Deliberate Speed, on 1950s U.S. culture, put paint splashes by Jackson Pollock up against the anal sex original of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” He found similar unruliness in Rice, giving his lyrics, plays and street prose two volumes on Harvard Press, one in a series for canonical literature. Rice, wheeling about just so, had become a classic. The respectability-skirting, music-carving lineage he shared with Billings was now not Charles Ives outsider art, or communal anti-modernity, but proto-rock ‘n’ roll.

As we can see, then, just by considering our oldest ancestor Billings and his apostles, definitions of music and music writing, even the kind of printed publication available, shifted as educated taste and job descriptions changed. The literature perennially highlighted some perspectives at the expense of others, formally and topically. Professionalism was always in question, as was primitivism. That was American music. And that was American music writing.

WOMEN WRITING OUTSIDE CATEGORIES

To skim my table of contents is to notice women who were only sometimes credited elsewhere and never together: Lucy McKim Garrison, Alice Fletcher, Emma Bell Miles, Olive Dame Campbell, Mabel Rowland, Edna Ferber, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, Constance Rourke, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Baker, Phyl Garland, Lilian Roxon, Eileen Southern, Gayl Jones, Loretta Lynn, Dena Epstein, Ellen Willis, Pamela Des Barres, Jessica Hagedorn, Sharyn McCrumb, Gina Arnold, Tricia Rose, Tia DeNora, Lise Waxer, Jennifer Egan. Few of these figures had an enduring career writing about popular music as such, within either a genre of music or an academic discipline. Most worked with collaborators, viewed their music writing as something less than expert, and used fiction, ethnography, or a perspective outside set fields to compensate. Reconstructing this writing has been rewarding, a story unto itself but also a lesson in why influential literature in the field we study often did not fit structurally.

For example, Slave Songs of the United States (1867), the first collection of African American song, existed because co-editor Lucy McKim’s parents were abolitionists and gender egalitarians. Brought to Port Royal, South Carolina, at age 19 to work with freed slaves, she used her piano and prose skills to write, in the eminent publication Dwight’s Journal of Music, the inaugural intellectual account of spirituals. Five years later, she and new husband Wendell Garrison, first literary editor of The Nation, got a book out. Scholar William Allen, not McKim Garrison, penned the intro, but the spark was hers. Similarly, fifty years later Olive Dame Campbell persuaded the English folk revivalist Cecil Sharp to extend her song catching, spurred when a woman who ran a mountain settlement house had a girl sing “Barbara Allen” to her. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917) was credited to both Campbell and Sharp, but he wrote that introduction; she barely appeared in the book’s pages. Other instances of her ventriloquism exist: finishing her husband John Campbell’s book, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, in 1921, after his death, and inserting her own thoughts on music in addition to running the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. The school’s lineage extended to Jean Ritchie’s older siblings, who brought back notions of how to popularize folk presentation that Ritchie would use in her ballad books and LPs.

The works Alice Fletcher, Natalie Curtis Burlin, and Frances Densmore, a trio whose 1880s to 1930s gathering of lore and field recordings from Native Americans helped create ethnomusicology, reveal women’s music writing then as in part a shuffle between the sentimental and the scientific. Her boss’s note to her first book credited Fletcher’s success studying Indians to “winning their love,” while her protégé Densmore critiqued this element in Fletcher’s work, saying of natives, “I absolutely refuse to sentimentalize about them.”6 Densmore was fated to produce dry tabulations for the Bureau of American Ethnology on an eternal series of one-year contracts, for the reason that women were not deemed worthy of full-time employment. Even so, she, like Fletcher and Curtis Burlin, pursued a sentimental ideal: preserving outsider culture from modernity. In this regard, she resembled McKim and original Show Boat novel author Edna Ferber, who categorized black music via an article by Curtis Burlin, drew on 1860s abolitionist writing in romanticizing black dockworkers singing spirituals, and loved a sentimental climax: think of hero Magnolia crying for the exposed-as-“passing” Julie. Where ethnologists waxed sentimental and scientific, Ferber played on the melodrama of New York media modes. Her novel incorporated, as bantering characters, her Broadway and Algonquin peers George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott. Show Boat’s enormous sweep, from the 1870s to the 1920s, balanced sentimentality and modernity, ephemeral stage lights and an eternal river.

Many early women writers are just now coming under scrutiny of scholarship. Brought to Tennessee by schoolteacher parents, Emma Bell Miles married a local man and never left. Her cultivation let her categorize “Some Real American Music” for Harper’s in 1904 and publish Spirit of the Mountains in 1905. She addressed her hard isolation in journals and stories; the first published only in 2014 and the fiction in 2016. She recorded the ice cream particulars of an August 1914 country dance and the appearance of a black guitarist telling the story of Stagolee. Her love for spouse Frank Miles led to horror —abortions induced to stave off another economically unsustainable child. Frolic to gothic: music and popular culture appeared in her writing as a romantic, environmental lure. Late in the journals: “If he spends my last cent and makes me pregnant again—perhaps then I will be allowed, even by Edith, to die in peace . . . . One young victim of a drunken husband’s neglect during childbirth looked up and said enviously, ’My goodness, Mis’ Miles, your husband sure must love you.’ I might have answered that there is a love that kills.”7

We know much about vaudeville comedian-singer Bert Williams because his self-described publicist, Mabel Rowland, who later ran a theater company and performed monologues (more study on her is needed), put together a 1923 compendium that cemented his legacy for decades before his revival. It isn’t clear whether Carrie Jacobs-Bond, the first well-paid female songwriter, will regain her place, which diminished after her interment, at 84 in 1946, as Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery’s second Blessed Immortal. But Jacobs-Bond’s memoir, The Roads of Melody, merits mention as music literature, ancestor to Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter. A widowed mother, Jacobs-Bond moved to Chicago and turned self-publisher (the Bond Shop) of a wedding standard and “The End of a Perfect Day,” a World War I “White Christmas” for troops far from home. One could dismiss her as easily as Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One did Forest Lawn: sentimental claptrap. But a twenty-first century vantage point notes her self-chosen hyphenated last name. Bond used tradition strategically. Sentimentality was her gift and her PR campaign.

And so on. Constance Rourke (American Humor, 1931) pioneered American Studies in the pages of Woman’s Home Companion and had a Davy Crockett book optioned by Hollywood; her focus on the way “human lineaments gradually begin to appear” in the comic trio of minstrels, westerners, and Yankees eluded blinkered cultural categorization.8 Dorothy Baker wrote Young Man With a Horn (1938), the first jazz novel, which ecumenical jazz critic Gary Giddins said stood out from later formulaic white projections of black otherness. Perhaps subsumed lesbianism gave her protagonists’ “funny slant on things”9 a grounding. Perhaps her sharper awareness of race and class expressed in fiction accorded her the critic’s role jazz mags would have denied her. Skipping too far ahead (I may have digging to do), Phyl Garland’s Soul (1969) presented autoethnography as musicology before Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. Garland was an Ebony writer whose mother edited the black newspaper Pittsburgh Courier and performed a mean take on Ethel Waters’s “Down Home Blues.” Soul gave an expansive, all-in-the-family definition of the genre, from “After Hours” by Avery Parrish with Erskine Hawkins’s band to Dinah Washington; and Nat Cole fighting it out with Muddy Waters; shrewd talk on appropriation, skin tone, and radio. Garland would pioneer cultural reporting at Columbia, yet an anthology of her articles still does not exist.

Far more connections need drawing. The Dena Epstein of Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (1977) was a modern-day Lucy McKim Garrison, a librarian in Illinois in 1953 deciding to read for decades through every old source she could find. We marvel today at an 1819 New Orleans visitor writing, “On Sabbath evening the African slaves meet on the green, by the swamp and rock the city with their Congo dances,” because Epstein found it in a pseudonymously published 1824 volume.10 One might connect Lilian Roxon, writing herself into a male-dominated field with the 1969 Rock Encyclopedia, to Gina Arnold still working through genre and gender with her 1993 alternative rock study Route 666; and put Emma Bell Miles in conversation with the ballad novels of Sharyn McCrumb at century’s end. Balance Garland’s familial approach with Eileen Southern, her counterpart in time, who kept soul at a remove in The Music of Black Americans (1971), after years on the black college margins. Southern earned a Ph.D. unfunded from NYU for studying a Renaissance composer; she’d become Harvard’s first black female full professor and original Afro-American Studies chair. Open that soul moment to the haunted blues novels of Gayl Jones, the post-colonial internationalism of Jessica Hagedorn novels, and the scant mention of soul criticism in the acclaimed but brief rock criticism of Ellen Willis.

The foundational figure for all of these placements and displacements would be Zora Neale Hurston, who began Mules of Men (1935) with this sentence: “I was glad when somebody told me, ‘You may go and collect Negro folk-lore’.” The first ethnography of black culture by an African American and literary gem practiced what Hurston called “featherbed resistance”—a cagey coding. Not allowed or perhaps able to make certain statements outright, Hurston conjured a self and approximated a context: an appearing trick that took decades to complete. If James Weldon Johnson, the Floridian elder she mocked as “passing for colored,” was a cultural politician, Hurston was what Trudier Harris called “performing personae”: scholar, storyteller, and trickster icon of the folk. Roshanak Kheshti found inspiration in Hurston’s “sonic infidelity.”

Unable to define music within academic fields like anthropology, within literary movements like the Harlem Renaissance, within the journalism of jazz and rock, some women found other perches. Their precarity reads as prescient now, modeling hybrid perspectives — formally in the writing, topically in the choice of music or what in music mattered. A tree branch connects Hurston to Tricia Rose, the first hip-hop “blackademic,” theorizing rupture and flow. Another extends to the ethnography of short-lived Lise Waxer, a Canadian of Chinese and Jewish origins studying salsa in the vinyl museum city of Cali, Columbia. “Salsa’s diverse, multiracial heritage and complex spread through the world reflects my own disjunct sense of personal identity,” she wrote.11 Fletcher and Densmore would have loved how Tia DeNora bent sociology and the science/sentiment battles they’d fought. She illuminated women in the work place, listening to manage emotion: “Thus, the ‘everyday’ is never ‘ordinary’. It is the site where the extraordinary achievement of ‘dwelling-in-the-world-with-others’ is achieved. Making sense of reality is the means for that end and it can thus be seen as a form of devotion.”12

SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION AND THE BLACK VERNACULAR

If a villain has emerged in my research, it might be the social science that Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison’s favorite music theorist, called social science fiction. Murray retired from a military career before writing from Harlem a mix of essays, music-filled novels, and as-told-to memoirs with Count Basie and Jo Jones. Murray associated the statistic types in sociology and related fields with the Moynihan Report blasting black families; he loved, by contrast, classic American Studies treatises by Constance Rourke. He called himself “a writer whose nonfiction represents an effort to play literary vamps and intellectual riffs equivalent to the musical ones.”13 It’s easy to update Murray’s perspective: Robin Kelley, scholar of race, communism, and Thelonious Monk, wrote “Looking for the ’Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto,” to make a similar point, while the powerful essays of Brent Edwards focused on black music as an inherently literary project, using James Weldon Johnson’s writing on spirituals, for example, to “theorize a black poetics of transcription.”14 (O’Meally, ed., 581).

Kelley and Edwards both write within “new jazz studies,” an academic revisionism, captured in anthologies such as The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998) that targeted not only social science but also white-dominated jazz criticism. Building off the “Jazz and the White Critic” section of Amiri Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones) enduring Blues People (1962), this approach viewed magazine work as cutting music off from its cultural sources, to favor a rarefied work of art over communal or conjunctural process. Such revisionism resembled later “rockism” and “poptimism” arguments in criticism and popular music studies: again, strictures of genre often parallel strictures of academic disciplines in confining music writing. But if new jazz studies found sustenance in prestigious universities, earlier jazz criticism created those institutional links and modeled some ideas more than the revisionists admit. New jazz studies positioned us to see Duke Ellington’s battles to produce symphonies differently than, say, John Hammond did. Yet reading Ellington books, critic Barry Ulanov’s 1946 Duke Ellington presaged current viewpoints, just as Ulanov’s hiring as an English prof by Columbia helped new jazz studies take hold there.

The challenge is how best to explore what Baraka called “the changing same” of the R&B he’d grown up with, what his eventual son-in-law Guthrie Ramsey called Race Music: From Bebop to Hip-Hop, and what I’d sum up as the problematic position of the black vernacular in American pop and art culture. With that as the question, a long history opens up. Slave-born James Trotter, whose 1878 Music and Some Highly Musical People, earned him the title of “America’s First Black Music Historian,” wanted to signal uplift even as the North abandoned Reconstruction. Ramsey argued that “the collision between Trotter’s racial politics and his Euro-based aesthetic perspectives formed an important and persistent tension in future work on black music.”15 The need to find winners forced Trotter beyond the composer-centered accounts of other music historians, to the place where a Justin Holland, an Afromodernist in the parlance of Race Music, fit the bill; he made his living creating arrangements for guitar and authored an instructional book.

A half-century later, W. C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology showcased an Alabamian able to amass and define culture in the modernity of Jim Crow lynch law and Beale Street respite, using secular music his pastor father despised to pursue status as a bandleader catering to whites and a songwriter-publisher. He set up Pace-Handy in the New York of Bert Williams and George Gershwin, held on as sheet music faltered, then partnered with a white lawyer and populist music critic, Abbe Niles, to secure business and burnish his reputation. Blues: An Anthology, with its expansive intro and song notes by Niles in conversation with Handy, illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, turned Handy into a figure the Harlem Renaissance and ASCAP alike regarded as “Father of the Blues.” Charley Patton, who hoped to join Handy’s Mississippi band but couldn’t read music well enough, came through white collector-historians to define Delta blues as vernacular expression. By contrast, Handy’s compositions, blue notes in ragtime, tango passages in 12-bar structures, were compromised but versatile. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor incorporated his songs into their fiction; Gershwin, Whiteman, and the Castles connected them to orchestras. To Niles, whose essays deserve a book, Handy understood that “the essence of jazz is spontaneous deviation from the score,” finding space in “the breaks” for soloing just as he found room in pop for “the mocking, ironic, or defiant discontent of the old folk-blues.” Blues: A Compilation included verse supplied by Langston Hughes, who was called “likely to do for the blues verses what Handy will be shown to have done for the airs.” Material from “Rhapsody in Blue” sat alongside folk blues ballad “Joe Turner.”16

Flash ahead another half-century, to Gayl Jones, an African American woman from Kentucky in her early twenties during the Black Power era. Her poem “Deep Song,” named after a Billie Holiday recording, pinpointed the increasingly fixed, almost burdensome tradition she aligned herself with: “The blues is calling my name… Sometimes he is a good dark man/Sometimes he is a bad dark man.” Then again, there was a countermelody in the verse, free as the 1970s with a wink like Jill Scott: “He sits with his knees apart/His fly is broken…. I tell him he’d better/do something about his fly.”17 Jones was a creative writing student at Brown, where black mentor Michael Harper referred her to then-editor Toni Morrison; she burst into prominence with Corregidora, a novel about a blues singer, with generation as a metaphor of black diasporic modernity. The good dark man/bad dark man is Mutt, who pushes protagonist Ursa down stairs and leaves her barren; a generation later, she returns to him. A generation after Corregidora, Jones returned to public attention: she’d married Robert Higgins, given up tenure at the University of Michigan to flee the U.S. with him as he escaped a felony charge, returned with him from Paris for her dying mother in the 1990s, and then watched Higgins stab himself to death when police tried to apprehend him. There is no information on her life in Kentucky since.

Jones told Harper she revered Their Eyes Were Watching God but questioned if Zora Neal Hurston had fully digested her anthropological education in letting the vernacular be the dominant voice of her novel. Taking up that challenge herself, Jones sought “connection with the oral storytelling and black music continuum” and talked of finding forms “that can bring in everything,” of her gender sketches as “blues relationships… Blues acknowledges all different kinds of feelings at once.” And she returned to her muse: “Why sing something the same way twice? I’m thinking about Billie Holiday here, of course. That’s the tradition. I like to change a tune.“18 Emily Lordi, in Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature, asked us to “recover the sounds that make writers want to align themselves with musicians in the first place and the literary effects that could make such an effort worthwhile.” She saw Jones and Holiday alike as “timbral virtuosos,” unfixed in their artistry rather than imprisoned by biography or by a static notion of the blues, jazz, or any other folk/art/race constellation. “In this reading,” Lordi wrote, “black literature is not authenticated by a stable image of black music but instead serves to make music newly, productively, strange.”19

A subsection of a journal article is no place to recover the full chronology of intellectual treatments of black vernacular, a force that could never be neatly itemized anyhow. My hope is that we will move to a view of it as, indeed, literary, and that a race-, class-, and gender-aware “social science fiction” — Afrofuturism, perhaps? — can rival sociology, jazz or rap disciplinarians as a structure of inquiry.

ANTHOLOGICAL POPTIMISM

When Stephen Foster’s older brother Morrison published an airbrushed short account of him in 1896, with a staggeringly persuasive 160-song appendage, it initiated a century’s worth of books that explored the murky, short, and frustrating life of a figure whose legacy turned out to be enduring, yet also vexing to parse. His minstrel songs became folk songs became sentimental ballads, and his parodies of black identity became romantic artistry later seen as pop craftsmanship.

During Foster’s life, critics carped about Foster’s popular tunes, with John Sullivan Dwight in 1853 likening their ubiquity to “a morbid irritation of the skin.”20 But such early scholars of American music as Frederic Ritter and Louis Elson insisted on Foster’s importance: as a songwriter he fit the model of a composer, as a popular author he fit a democratic nation, and in translating seemingly African American material he reworked the nation’s most distinctive folk material. Walter Whittlesey and Oscar Sonneck’s 1915 Catalogue of First Editions of Stephen C. Foster (1826-1864) provided a second round of documentation. Leading figures of Tin Pan Alley claimed Foster to cast their Jewish immigrant ditties as all-Americana. Swept up in the revival — Henry Ford sent a house misattributed to Foster’s childhood to his museum in Dearborn — retired Indiana manufacturer Joseph Kirby Lilly created Foster Hall, with its own bulletin for collector conversation and a private curator. No popular music figure had ever received such sacralization: a thousand facsimile collections of Foster songs, in metal cabinets, were sent to public libraries.

I offer this condensed version of a longer entry on Foster books to make two points. First, there isn’t a subject in American popular music, from artist to genre, that hasn’t seen its meaning shift dramatically over time; confronting this for any single example gives a better glimpse of how music has registered than studying a particular work or era in isolation. Second, books matter, not least the kinds of books that — like New-England Psalm-Singer, Slave Songs, and Biography, Songs and Musical Compositions of Stephen C. Foster — don’t fit our standard definition of a book.

Consider Record Research (1955-1969), the almost mythic first survey of Billboard charts hits fashioned by a Midwestern 45s collector, which now resides in non-circulating copies in 18 institutions. By 1973, the year of American Graffiti and its nostalgia for early Top 40, Top Pop Records 1955-1972 had turned into the juggernaut it remains: an approach to compiling popular music success as flexible as a jukebox or radio format. Joel Whitburn published books on Top R&B Records, Top LPs, Top Country, and Top Easy Listening. Because Billboard started its Top 100 record charts in 1955, the same year rock and roll became a craze, charts told the story of this pop era. Tin Pan Alley had the novelty hit and standard; and jazz had the discography book to reflect the mesmerizing effect of electric recording. Pop/rock was about studio concoctions ratified by airplay. Even Top Pop Records 1955-1972, a slim volume compared to the gargantuan revised and expanded Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits 7th edition for 1955-2000, contained 2,735 artists and 11,041 record titles. Pop was voluminous, welcoming, and novel; to make a weekly rundown of 100 records was far less fraught than competing for an Academy Award or an election. Charts books chronicled the evolving rival mainstreams of American music.

JoAnne Mancini coined the phrase “anthological modernism” to refer to collections, most notably Harry Smith’s Folkways anthology, that packaged song to encompass the world in a document. The work Mancini covered, by Alan Lomax or Ruth Crawford Seeger, was often anti-pop in sentiment: no Stephen Foster songs, for example. But expand the category and we can see songbooks of all kinds. Sheet music in a big collection, like songs on an album or numbers in a musical, elevates category. The basic move, from novelty to standard, article to volume, has taken popular music writing through decades of pop culture reclamation. From the original vernacularist, Walt Whitman, and his ever-expanding Leaves of Grass, the story of how writers heard America singing has been the story of what book they found to publish the tale.

A quick survey will let the variety of examples become an anthological statement in themselves. Oscar Sonneck’s 1905 Bibliography of Early Secular American Music, if too “scientific” in claims, was a self-published gambit: Sonneck invented a Library of Congress job stressing citational research, alive to a 1767 Philadelphia society farce featuring the characters Hum, Parchment, Quadrant and Rattletrap. A year later, Charles Harris’s How to Write a Popular Song competed with fifty other manuals, an industrialization of bohemia (“You must always wear your hair long enough to show people that you are the real article,” Gussie Davis cautioned.21) dissecting pop more pragmatically than musicologically. “Frankly, the volume is meant to be popular,” explained John Lomax of his Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 191022, the first big collection of American (rather than transplanted English) folk tunes; no purist, he had assembled composite verses, not standard academic taxonomies of variations, popularizing “Home on the Range.”

In the 1920s, popular music belonged to a robust modernity of leisure and social progress. Gilbert Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts solidified popular culture magazine criticism, putting Irving Berlin and Al Jolson alongside Charlie Chaplin, Krazy Kat comics, and Ziegfeld Follies, recognizing George Gershwin’s revolutionary potential even before “Rhapsody in Blue” and locating the innovation of “lively arts” in form: how movies resisted legitimate theater, for example. Alain Locke’s edited volume, The New Negro: An Interpretation, codified the Harlem Renaissance with a dazzle of artists, poets, and critics: blues, already being sold in the hundreds of thousands by Bessie Smith on Columbia, turned up first in a Rudolph Fisher noir short story, “City of Refuge” that may have inspired Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Air Shaft.”

Jazz, a spicy condiment in the 1920s, was codified in subsequent anthologies. Editors Frederic Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith presented in Jazzmen (1939) a cohort agreeing on terms of popular music evaluation, epitomized in Armstrong’s jazz solos and lost-soul/white collector stand-in Bix Beiderbecke, that was neither pop nor classical — Roger Pryor Dodge raged against sanctifying Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Before cool, the Jazzmen critics were hot. A generation later, Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff used the new form of the book length collective oral history to create Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (1955), subtitled The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It. The men? Jazz genre rules, defined by men to favor men, became one of the main reasons for the thirty-year scarcity in books by women between Young Man with a Horn and Soul, the exceptions largely coming in folk and popularized classical categories. Shapiro and Hentoff, white progressives working at Down Beat, used the voices of black artists who were spoken for in Jazzmen to challenge fans to think about race, but only by eliding questions of gender. Music magazines, traditionally, were sold to advertisers as men’s magazines, and the behind-the-scenes oral history was a male fantasy, putting the reader onstage and backstage.

Rock and roll reinvented industry and critical standards. The multiple editions (ten from 1964 to 2007) of M. William Krasilovsky and ‎Sidney Schemel’s This Business of Music sought a stable through line as record sellers navigated payola scandals and superstar contracts. Bill and Sid, two company men, anticipated in myriad subclauses the production of culture perspective Richard Peterson later found for popular music sociology. Tom Wolfe’s first collection, Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, (1965), defined “new journalism” as the glossy mags’ new Gilbert Seldes, caring nothing about electrified blues but everything about how DJ Murray the K, producer Phil Spector, Warhol celebrity Jane Holzer, media guru Marshall McLuhan, hi-fi sex recluse Hugh Hefner, and breast implant celeb Carole Doda had electrified syntax. With The Aesthetics of Rock (1970), Richard Meltzer was Wolfe as rock critic, transcribing “Surfin’ Bird” as “unknown tongues” manifesto, including “prolonged sounds of vomiting”23 and writing “Recent Reinstantiations of Flea-Flop in the Mustard Tusk Scene” on commission from Gilbert Chase. Robert Christgau’s Village Voice column of short “consumer guide” ratings for new albums, collected as Christgau’s Record Guide in 1981, belonged to this pop-rock explosion, too — Bob wasn’t so much canonizing as using the endless listening party to find new wrinkles in his, and popular music’s, unsummarizable aesthetic.

But rock critics codified their taste as fiercely as jazz critics had, displayed by The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll James Miller edited in 1976. “As for the question: is this for real, for fun, or for money—well, it was for all three, and that’s rock and roll,” Miller wrote. That explained the difference from jazz, though again it was white guys scribing and (even more) overvaluing stand-ins.24 Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (1975), quickly established as the best book on rock and roll, used an anthological approach; Marcus, a Harry Smith devotee, put disparate artists in an array. Yet Robert Johnson (old blues), Sly Stone (funk gloom), and Elvis Presley (reclaimed from scorn) were not his peers like the Band and Randy Newman. In contrast, Roxon’s 1969 Rock Encyclopedia, though less read, provided a knowing tone — media and industry insiders identifying why something worked or savoring an outré detail — used afterwards by entertainment journalism, especially women kept from rock criticism. David Ritz, king of the as-told-to book, began his project of chronicling black artists’ rock criticism made subsidiary with Brother Ray in 1978. And Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992), essays again registering louder in book form, pioneered a black power jazz-rock prose that became rap criticism.

By century’s end, there were anthologies for all purposes. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s edited collection, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, the epitome of academic precarity when published in 1976, had fostered a global cultural studies movement, at least outside music departments. (Cultural studies plus pop-rock criticism equaled IASPM and JPMS.) Inside musicology, Sonneck and Chase’s salvoes had become Amerigrove and the Sonneck Society, later Society for American Music. Ethnomusicology pondered what its seemingly immortal co-founder, Bruno Nettl, counted as Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts in 1983, then added more in further editions. Elsewhere in the subfield, Charles Keil and Steven Feld debated Music Grooves, their Essays and Dialogues collected in 1994. Gary Giddins, with Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998), and Will Friedwald, with A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (2010) presented massive compendia of jazz criticism that embraced pop, of a kind. Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff’s multi-volume histories of African American popular music started in 1889 and refused genre barriers to emphasize primary sources: new Sonnecks and Dena Epsteins. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal’s edited That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004), showcased the first popular music genre whose academic writers were as influential as journalists. And Jennifer Egan’s 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won a Pulitzer by imagining a futuristic, melted America revealed in a set of powerpoint slide lists that worked as a metaphor for blinkered communication: “Great Rock and Roll Pauses.”

CONCLUSION (OF SORTS)

So is my argument, as JPMS looks forward to the next 250 years of writing on American popular music, that we save room in our heads and hearts for the likes of “Recent Reinstantiations of Flea-Flop in the Mustard Tusk Scene”? Maybe so! The one kind of anthology I did not mention as I ramped up just now is Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media & Cultural Studies, a four-volume collection put together by Simon Frith that currently retails for $1,259 on Amazon, discounted from a $1,775 Routledge list price. Michael Bull’s Sound Studies collection in the same series is a relative bargain at a $1,485 list, while The Grove Dictionary of American Music, edited by Michigan music department professor Charles Hiroshi Garrett and many subeditors before its release by Oxford in 2013, is priced in-between at $1,595, has more volumes, however, and used copies go for as little as $354.

If our goal is for JPMS to serve as a model for what a more inclusive popular music studies journal might represent, we’ll want to be careful not to stay within the confines that academia is so happy to provide. Fortunately, there is a vast and still largely unsurveyed history of popular music writing to draw upon in considering alternatives. Since the 1990s, academics have created a literature of the scholarly kind — studies that extended or critiqued other studies, shared keywords, and thematic university press book series. But growth as a field should not mean dismissing earlier writing in the interest of professionalization. Hybridity and patched-together methods are not a weakness of the popular music literature — they’re its essence. Rereading, with a sense of popular music writing as a literature rather than a category of cultural studies, can be as revisionist an act as wholly new explorations.

Just as songs gobble through the materials at their disposal — sounds, scenes, scenarios, lore and tech and marketing dollars — songbooks as a working literature are pragmatic, evocative and partial takes, indelible glimpses. American popular music grew up with a double anxiety: it wasn’t Europe, and it was the product of a people it enslaved and theatricalized. What Nick Tosches called the “twisted roots” of American music needn’t be unknotted: we can run our fingers around the tangle, reading a ballads novel Sharyn McCrumb wrote a touch quickly. She’s one of us, too. To rethink we need to reread, for the language as much as the ideas. Books position the writer and reader the way music positions performer and listener. A literature isn’t just linked citations: it’s a standard, a demo, a sentence worthy of our reverie.

Confused statements, incipient forms, underemployed intellectuals: these are at the core of the half-syntheses, the loopy work, of our songbooks. Tom Wolfe, the sort of ancestor many would leave behind, had a message from the Victorians for the world after the triumph of the vernacular. Here’s Wolfe: “Dots, dashes, exclamation points were dropped out of prose because they ‘reeked of sentiment.’ But an! is someone getting carried away. Why not?”25